01 November 2010

breaking open

I find myself in a constant state of reflection lately. Looking deeply at the things happening in my life, past events that have brought me to where I am now, the many paths I’ve taken and what role they all played in teaching me the valuable lessons I’ve had to learn. I’ve gone through some crappy times and have spent many a moment wondering why things had to be so hard, why life couldn’t just throw me a ball that I could see coming and allow me to easily whack it out of the ballpark.

I still find myself asking those same questions. Why can’t things just be a little easier? Why does every day have to be filled with stress? Work-stress, stress from a situation that just doesn’t seem to be going away, frustration with someone who says too much, frustration with someone who doesn’t say enough, stress from being overwhelmed with clutter and remodeling dirt. All I want to do is sit on my balcony listening to the birds, watching the sun set and feel the cool air refreshing my soul as the stars pop out one by one, showering me with their brightness, washing away the dirt of every day hardships.

I am aware that I should be looking at it from another perspective, as there are important lessons that I could be learning.

Perhaps the home remodeling is a perfect metaphor to my own internal remodeling. Perhaps I’ve been just as torn up inside as my house currently is. One by one, I need to examine each room of my soul, tear down some walls and put them back up a little more sturdy, carefully brush on a fresh coat or two of paint, re-wire the hardware, clean out the pipes.

Perhaps the stressful situation isn’t going away because I haven’t learned the lesson it’s trying to teach me yet. ……….and perhaps I’ve spent too much time listening to the person who doesn’t know when to shut up that I can’t hear the one who doesn’t seem to be saying anything.

Either way, I’ve been down deep in the muck, and I have spent a lot of time just trying to stay afloat, feeling like I’m running under water. But it’s starting to hit me, as I’ve made the attempt to just try to *be* more lately. There are many things I can’t control, but one thing that I CAN control is my attitude towards life. The more I crawl into a hole the worse I feel. The more I sit around and feel sorry for myself the further in the hole I will fall and it will just take that much longer to crawl out of it and start to brush myself off.

I don’t, by any means, have a perfect life. I hate my (day) job, I’m pretty much living paycheck to paycheck, I’m struggling with many of the things that most single mother’s struggle with, and there are many things that will happen in the coming months/year that are going to continue to tax my emotional stability. BUT….I can CHOOSE to stop allowing myself to be defined by what HAPPENS to me. I can choose to stop allowing all of this stuff to dictate how I feel. Many friends have tried to tell me this too, but I just poo-poo’d them, knowing that I had to come to this realization on my own. Knowing I had to see that the light is still there, and that the goodness comes from inside of me and it’s shining down into my hole in the form of a rope…a lifeline.

I think we all have a cave that we crawl into when we’re feeling drained. Everyone deals with their stress and baggage in their own way, and I think that we have to crawl into that cave to build up the reserves again so that we can be good for ourselves and for those around us. It’s in that cave that we do the reflecting, the rebuilding, and the analyzing. And I think it’s because we don’t go into that cave often enough in our every day lives, even when things are good, that we end up falling into it when things are bad.